


Cassie Lang's Resurrection Tour

by hulklinging



Category: Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Everyone Is Alive, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Reunions, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 04:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13426377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulklinging/pseuds/hulklinging
Summary: Cassie runs away from home again. This time, it all works out in the end.





	Cassie Lang's Resurrection Tour

**Author's Note:**

> This is a (super late) fill for Young Avengers Holiday Exchange 2017. [Meg](http://wiccanthewitch.tumblr.com/) wanted Cassie and Kate reunions, so hopefully this does the trick! I had to remember how to write all these characters, but I got there eventually. Huge thanks to [phoenixyfriend](http://phoenixyfriend.tumblr.com/) for organizing the whole thing, and your patience.

She goes home. She plays at being a good daughter, just like she used to, and it works, for a while.

But things like that don’t last forever, because even if she toes the line there’s always people who push right through it, who decide the best way to get to a superhero is go after his daughter, and it’s quick enough that she thinks they must have been old plans. Plans that were left to gather dust, when her death was announced. And they think they can just dust them off and put them back into action, like she’s the same person she was before she was put into the ground.

She’s not. Her skin is perfect, no hard-earned calluses. No scars to show that she’s failed and that she got up afterwards, every time but one. She clenches fists at her reflection, and goes to the gym, puts in the work (again). Maybe, she thinks, her body will start to feel like her own again. Once her muscles start to ache, she’ll remember these limbs are her own.

It doesn’t quite work that way, but it does make her body start to remember. Muscle memory is wild, because these aren’t even the same muscles and yet she remembers perfectly how she would pivot, growing and shrinking her limbs to make a hit or block that much better. She remembers, and she is consumed with how much she misses it.

When she finds out they’re moving, she can’t do it. She feels bad about it, she does, but not enough to stay. It’s time for Stature to come back from the dead, she thinks. Now that Cassie Lang has had some time to readjust.

She could go looking for her friends. She could, but she’s not sure if she remembers their addresses quite right. So, well, she takes a shortcut.

She doesn’t have a costume, doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t even have a codename. But she goes, and she finds a bit of trouble, and as she grows to match it, she can’t remember the last time her skin felt this right.

Cassie takes out a pair of men who had been busy cornering a woman in an alley. She makes quick work of it, but not quick enough to avoid having a bit of a crowd as she finishes tying the guys up and making sure the woman is alright.

“Aren’t you…?” asks someone on the crowd. She’s not sure who it is, and she’s not really sure she cares, either. The flash of a few cameras going off make it hard for her to see individual faces.

“I’m Cassie Lang,” she confirms. “I just want the next people who try to kidnap me to get at my dad to know what they’re getting into.”

None of her friends come, that first time. That’s fine. Hopefully one of these photos will make it to them.

There’s nothing left at the warehouse that used to serve as their hideout, but Cassie breaks in just to make sure. It’s a fine a place as any to sleep, a lot of stuff of theirs is gone but the couch is still there, and it was always pretty comfy. She crashes there, wakes up to twelve texts and ten calls from her mother and two from her father, and one from a number she doesn’t recognize.

**Be careful.**

She’s not sure what to make of that. It feels like a Jonas text, but she knows what happened there. The old news was a fresh wound for her, right after she came back, and it still hasn’t fully healed, so she tries to ignore it best she can. 

**Who is this?** She asks anyway.

Her parents get variations on the same message. She’s fine, she’s not coming home any time soon, and she reminds them that the bigger deal they make of this, the more likely less than savory people will come looking for her. It’s not enough to dissuade them from looking entirely, but hopefully it will make them do it quietly, which is better for her.

Regardless of what happened here to make the warehouse no longer in use, certain parts of it remain exactly the same. She digs around a bit, trying to remember where they’d tucked them away, and then finds the emergency stashes of clothes and other basic necessities they’d all packed up hidden behind a bit of loose wall. Go bags, Teddy had jokingly called them. For a superhero emergency, as opposed to a natural one. The clothing doesn’t really fit right, big in the shoulders and short in the leg, but it’s familiar and comfortable in a way that has been seriously lacking since she’s come back. She changes, tucks away the clothing she’s wearing back into her backpack, and by the time she’s returned to the common area, she has company.

Billy Kaplan stands there, where their third hand coffee table had sat, and it takes her a few good seconds to process it all, because he’s taller than he used to be, and there’s a confidence to his stance but also a weight. He’s gone through some stuff, she knows that. She’d read all she could, when she came back. She knows he hasn’t had the easiest go of it, even though the fan wikis she’d found had been scarce on some of the details. Still, he looks good. Like an adult, almost.

He turns, because she didn’t bother trying to walk quietly. When he sees her, his face shatters into a wide smile, and he manages three steps towards her before his self-doubt catches up with him, and he freezes. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes, and his voice is a little deeper, but als just the same. “We heard you were back, but we weren’t sure… We didn’t know how much you remembered, and we didn’t want to b-” He cuts himself off, and Cassie tries to guess at what he was about to say. Bother her? As if. But she can kind of understand. If one of her friends had… had died, and then come back years later, but didn’t remember her, she would probably leave them be too. She hadn’t forgotten anything, but that’s not what her father had implied, the first and only time he’d addressed her comeback with the press. It was all in the interest of her safety, of course. As per usual.

There’s the sound of another person from the room past the one they’re in, where their makeshift kitchen stood half-empty. Teddy’s head comes around the corner, and he looks much the same as Billy. Older, more world-worn, but still his sunshine self. Especially when he smiles at her.

“You are here!”

Billy’s posture goes from tentative to defensive, and the tension in the room disappears. “I haven’t messed up on a location spell in years,” he reminds Teddy, and when Teddy comes to stand next to him, their edges still fit together perfectly. This, more than anything, feels like coming home.

“Hey, guys,” she says, and that’s enough for both of them to move towards her, pulling her in for a hug tight enough to make her head spin. Or maybe that’s just the tears, which start flowing almost as soon as they touch her. She’d missed them so much, her team. She feels terribly small, but unlike other times when she feels small, there’s no fear in her in this moment. Just an overwhelming sensation of being Here, of being present, and her own heartbeat thundering away in her ears.

Both of them are talking, their voices flowing over each other just so to make it impossible for her to pull out the individual words. She gets distracted by Billy’s hand anyway, and the ring on his finger. She grabs at it, making Teddy go quiet and Billy trail off, and her grin is wide and bright as she looks from one boy to the other.

“Is this…?”

Billy’s gone red and Teddy’s ears are pink, and they both look so happy, and they’re both here, and she thinks that this moment, more than anything else since coming back, has made her happy she’s gotten this second chance. She loves her family, of course she does. But here are two people who were so important to her and they’re both here and okay, and she can’t put into words how much that means for her to get to see.

“It’s legal here now, isn’t it?” She remembers reading that. “Congratulations!”

Billy leans his head against Teddy’s shoulder, and curls a few of his fingers around her hands, which are still holding his. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, it…”

“It was kind of impulsive,” Teddy fills in. “It was a little while after… everything.” After she died, she thinks he means, but doesn’t push. “But we’re thinking maybe next summer?”

“Cool.” A weak word for such a big thing, but it’s what she can manage. “That’s really cool.”

A text tone goes off, and Billy pulls away to dig out his phone. He makes a face down at it, then sends off a short reply.”

“Tommy will be here soon,” he says, and Teddy nods. “He didn’t want to come along until we were sure.”

In case it had been a trap, or in case she couldn’t remember them? She wonders, but doesn’t ask. Instead, she asks something easier.

“Do you have Kate’s number? And Eli’s?”

When Billy had momentarily moved away to shoot his brother the text, Teddy had shifted so that his head was rested on top of hers, so she feels his hum of surprise more than hears it, as it vibrates through her skull.

“You haven’t talked to Kate yet?” Billy looks shocked, and she can feel the guilt creeping up on her. She knows she should have made more of an effort to get in touch with Kate, as soon as she came back. But at first she had been so scared of seeing the things that had changed, every grey hair in her mother’s hair another thing she’d missed while she’d been gone. Seeing her best friend all grown up now had just seemed like too much. And then the longer she waited, the harder it had gotten.

“Eli’s at Penn, studying criminal justice,” Teddy says, maybe feeling how her body tensed up at Billy’s question. “I have his number though, if you want to call him.”

“That would be great,” she says, staring at Billy, hoping he can see the fear in her eyes, and doesn’t think she’s a coward. “I’d like that. Tomorrow, maybe?”

“For sure.”

Billy’s staring at her, and maybe it’s just her being hopeful but he looks like he gets it. “I can text Kate too, if you want.”

Telling Kate she’s back - really back, all of her back - over text doesn’t feel right. She says as much, and Billy nods.

“Once Tommy gets here, we can go to her apartment?”

“That sounds…” Terrifying. Awesome. Like something she’s not sure if she’s ready for. “Great. Yeah. Great.”

There’s a sudden breeze all around them, and then Tommy’s there, and Teddy lets go of her so she can give the speedster a hug before he can protest. He barely even grumbles, and gosh, Adult Tommy. Isn’t that something.

“Nice to see you, kid,” he says, and his teasing tone settles over her like a blanket, like with every word she hears from them her clothes fit just a little better.

“You too,” she says, and she’s crying again but even his eyes look a little red and no one says anything about it.

She wants to hear about everything, good and bad. She wants to ask them about the end of that fight, about how Jonas died, about all the things she read online and hear it in their voices, as opposed to from some stranger on the internet. But that might have to wait, because her ribcage is feeling fragile, like too much weight might shatter it entirely. It can wait, she realizes. Because they have time, now. And all the tiny insecurities that have built up since she started breathing again, the ones that said they wouldn’t want anything to do with her now, start to erode away, as they chatter at her with an undercurrent of excitement. Teddy hugs her again, picking her up and spinning her around with a laugh, and Tommy’s smile looks more genuine than she remembers it usually being, and Billy’s gestures are wide and excited as he talks about nothing in particular, all of them leaning towards her like they don’t mind at all that she was the baby of the group even before she went and lost a few years.

They’re casually walking as they talk, and she expects them to turn towards the train and head towards the parts of the city with pedigrees like Kate’s live, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, they end up in front of a rather sketchy looking apartment building, and Tommy does something at the door so either they’re breaking in or he has a key, and Cassie’s not sure which one is more surprising.

“Kate lives here?”

“Oh!” Billy snaps his fingers, and blue sparks tumble from his fingers and lazily travel down his hand, disappearing before they hit the ground. “Yeah, she got disowned? And then went to LA for a bit, but she’s back now.”

“It was very teen movie,” Teddy adds in. “But also the mob was there.”

“Are you all coming in or not?” Tommy shouts from the door, and they file in after him and up the stairs. With each step, Cassie gets more nervous, which is silly, because she’s already done this three times today. But Kate was her best friend. Her (co)leader. For some reason, it feels different.

Finally, they’re in front of an apartment door, exactly the same as every other door except there’s something that looks suspiciously like an arrow hole right to the left of the peephole. That, more than the comforting weight of Teddy’s hand on her shoulder or how Billy bumps into her other side with a grin or the little thumbs up Tommy shoots her before he opens the door with another key, is what gives her the courage to step forward and into Kate’s apartment.

“Tommy, if you keep doing that without knocking, you’re going to end up getting shot!” calls a familiar voice from another room.

“They haven’t invented an arrow that could catch me!” he shoots back, grinning, and Cassie tucks that away as something to ask about, later, maybe. When she feels like she can get enough air in her lungs to form speech.

Kate comes around the corner into the front hallway, and whatever retort she was going to throw at Tommy dies on her tongue. She stares at Cassie, which gives Cassie a moment to take her in. Taller, like they all are. More fit, too. She looks different, of course, but she also looks exactly the same, and that hits harder than anything else today, than anything else these whole last few months.

“I like the bangs,” she gets out, and Kate laughs through her tears and pulls Cassie into her arms. Cassie clings to her, feels like she might collapse, but that’s okay. She knows Kate will keep her up.

Later, they’ll all sit down on the floor of Kate’s living room, talk about what Cassie missed. Someone will order food and they’ll laugh and talk over each other and Cassie will wonder when they last all did this, because there are awkward bumps in the conversation of people relearning each other, and it’s not just her causing them. Cassie will look them over, her team, and feel so full. Content. It’s fine, if they haven’t done this in a while, because it’s happening now, and she’s around to make sure it happens again. Kate will offer up her extra bedroom and Cassie will say yes and plans will be made, plans to go shopping and see more old friends and other things, always together.

Later, Cassie will look at her phone to a text from that unknown number that just says  **We missed you.** And she’ll let herself wonder about data, data that makes up a person, and all the places that data could hide. She’ll ask the others what they think, whether she’s being a silly little girl or if her hope is as all possible.

Her friends have never seen her as a silly little girl, though. And isn’t that what they’ve always done? Make the impossible possible?

For now, she just lets herself exist, surrounded by her team, and the hole that those years in the ground left in her heart gets smaller with every moment she’s with them.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at [hulklinging,](http://hulklinging.tumblr.com/) if you want to hang out.


End file.
